Renée Stout

Renée Stout (b. 1958, Junction City, KS) lives and works in Washington, D.C. As a mixed media artist, Stout draws inspiration from current social and political events, the African diaspora, everyday urban life, and the spiritual realm. Stout's objects and paintings often emerge from her decades of research into the art history and spiritual traditions of Hoodoo, which have evolved from African roots through American slavery to the present.

Small, handmade sculptures are an essential part of Stout's practice. These fabricated, machine-like objects are meant to connect us to the spiritual realm and otherworldly powers. More broadly, they represent the hopes and desires that faiths and religions around the world seek to fulfill. Universal desires for health, love, survival and happiness.

Stout's work has recently been exhibited at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, NY (2024); the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN (2022); the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, TX (2022); the African American Museum in Philadelphia, PA (2023); and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA (2023).

Her work is included in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Nasher Museum of Art, the High Museum in Atlanta, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Saint Louis Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and many others.

Stout has a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University. She is the recipient of the Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation Award and the Virginia A. Groot Foundation Award (2nd place) in 2020, and the Women's Caucus for Art, Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018. She is the recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, the Pollock Krasner Foundation Award, the Joan Mitchell Painter and Sculptor's Grant Award, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, among others.